Tarek Bin Laden’s Red Sea bridge

A company owned by Osama Bin Laden’s half-brother has proposed building a bridge across Mandab Strait on the Red Sea, to link Djibouti to Yemen.

Tarek Bin Laden Construction is negotiating with the two governments about plans for the 28.5km bridge - one of the longest in the world.

The proposed bridge would carry a six-lane motorway and a railway.

Apart from the $70bn cost, critics have pointed out that the project would be sited in an earthquake zone.

New cities would be built at either end of the bridge.

Doctors group backs marijuana for medical uses
Fri Feb 15, 2008 5:56pm EST
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leading U.S. doctors group has endorsed using marijuana for medical purposes, urging the government to roll back a prohibition on using it to treat patients and supporting studies into its medical applications.

The American College of Physicians, the second-largest doctors group in the United States, issued a policy statement on medical marijuana this week after it was approved by its governing body, the group said on Friday.

Meet Victoria Kokobi, Indian hemp dealer who disguised as garri merchant
Monday, February 11, 2008

For Victoria, a 62-year-old grandmother, garri business is hard and not lucrative when compared with sales of marijuana. For several years, she has been involved in the trade, using garri as a cover up, but recently, the eagle eyes of the officials of the NDLEA got her.

Madam Victoria Kokobi, alias Madam 1010

Madam Victoria Kokobi, a 62-year-old grandmother was

known as a trader in garri. Unknown to many, however, this business she was popularly known with was just a guise. She was a ‘distributor’ in the illegal business of marijuana sales. In fact, she was a wholesaler.

GPs have got Britain ‘hooked on painkillers’

Peddlers of Pharmaceutical Narcotics

Doctors are unwittingly fuelling the growing number of Britons hooked on prescription drugs by giving patients dangerously high doses of medicines that can prove highly addictive, a parliamentary inquiry has concluded.

MPs say that ‘mis-prescribing’ of drugs such as painkillers, sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety pills by some doctors is ‘leading to addiction and dependence’.

GPs ignore official advice that patients should take powerful benzodiazepine tranquillisers for no more than four weeks by handing out repeat prescriptions without even seeing them in their surgery, says an all-party parliamentary group on drug misuse. The Home Office blames the mis-use benzodiazepines for causing 17,000 deaths since their introduction in the Sixties.

Australia apology to Aborigines

- Kevin Rudd’s apology represents a break from previous policies
Parliament statement;

- Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas keep the money, said
Noel Pearson Aboriginal leader

The Australian government has made a formal apology for the past wrongs caused by successive governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament to all Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss”.

He singled out the “Stolen Generations” of thousands of children forcibly removed from their families.

Ritualized Racketeering

When gold reached dizzying heights above $850 U.S. a troy ounce this week, it cast a spotlight on a ritual that has taken place in London for the past 88 years.

Twice a day, representatives of five banks pick up the phone to trade physical gold and arrive at the London “fixing” price, which then becomes a benchmark for gold around the world.

As the clock in the vast Barclays Capital trading room in London ticks toward 3 p.m., attention turns to Marc Booker, the bank’s head of spot gold trading.

The Natufians: The Original Black Africans of Israel - By Jide Uwechia

Seven or eight thousand years ago in what geologist call the Holocene era (i.e. modern times) a black tribe from Africa established themselves in Palestine. The New York Times reported this spectacular fact in many of its editions between the years 1857 and 1932.

Skulls and thighbones of the indigenes of this culture were unearthed and studied for the first time between 1928 and 1932. The archelogical sites were first pin-pointed at Shukbah near Jerusalem and later in caves at Mount Carmel.

Zimbabwe: How Secret Societies Shape Western Politics

Published by the Government of Zimbabwe
The Herald (Harare)

OPINION
10 January 2008
Posted to the web 10 January 2008

Mabasa Sasa
Harare

IN the foreword to his book, Captains and Kings, Taylor Caldwell dedicates his work to those young men and women disillusioned by the way the world is being run but do not know why or how.